Occultations

PubDate: 5/25/2010

ISBN: 9780982573129

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $15.00

Quantity Available: 65

Pages: 168

SKU #: G13F

Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the "courage of paradoxical evocation." For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that "the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the 'surveillance-industrial complex' but also to the limitations of language's ability to fully articulate 'what work this dying is.'" In (un)mapping its state of accelerated becoming, this (collective) body asks whether it can, through radical re-narration of its (re)constitution by neo-liberal capitalism and militarism, allegorize the wider catastrophic affects these logic-systems have on an ecosystem. "Is it possible," asks Laura Elrick, "to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d?" As place, the occulted recursively struggles to perform exploratory surgery on normative valuations of its capacities, on what is taken to be possible and what is not.

“An occultation is a withdrawing, a flight or sentence into non-
existence. In David Wolach's OCCULTATIONS, the reader becomes
propinquitous to so much that she can't see, so withdrawn has the
actual world become through a media which functions as the eyes and
ears to the detriment of a becoming proprioceptive. By amplifying the
senseless via pun and other synaesthesic language effects, Wolach
overturns common sense and returns his reader to their senses. What
would be contemporary peeks out through Wolach's picnolepsy. Element (principally fire) is not merely a theme but a burden‘the fires have not died / they've moved away with the j o b s’the ethical burden of whatever remains in the movement between site and nonsite, I and we, direct address and a corrosive intertextual poetics in the service of secular messianic event. ‘dear, __________’ ‘who will take me from
our ashen / refuge?’ Reading OCCULTATIONS, ‘I’ takes refuge in loss, lack, and non-presence saved only by what cannot be redeemed: the
wreck of our bodies shored by the catastrophic convergence of late
capitalist Neoliberalism and cross-cultural moral fundamentalisms.”
Thom Donovan